Saturday, November 29, 2008

Saat Sawal Yane Hatim Tai has a pedigree that pretty much guarantees phantasmagorical content. It was produced by Homi Wadia, who, as both a director and producer, had a hand in creating a wide array of colorful Indian action and fantasy films, going all the way back to those starring his future bride Fearless Nadia in the early thirties. On top of that, it was directed by Babubhai Mistry, who helmed the classic Mythologicals Mahabharat and Sampoorna Ramayana, as well as effects-laden fantasies like Magic Carpet and the dinosaur-rich Dara Singh peplum King Kong.

The story concerns a hero who must complete a series of tasks in order to lift a curse that has resulted in a young bride being turned to stone on her wedding day. Beyond that, the lack of English subs prevents me from providing any further synopsis. That's okay, though, because I mainly watch movies like this for the visuals, and in that respect I was not disappointed. Following are some pictorial highlights.

The synopsis on the VCD case describes these winged ladies as "Faries", but here in America we call them "Angels" and count on them to provide us with winning lottery numbers:

And this place looks like Hell. Literally!

Okay, now that we've gotten Saat Sawal's weird references to Christian iconography out of the way, let's move on to some of its other visual wonders:

Okay, so women really do grow on trees... or at least their heads, apparently.

Yarrghhh! Tree monster!

Princess Monkey Mouth.The captive maiden is unimpressed by the Mohawk-sporting wizard's assertion that he owns all of The Exploited's albums on vinyl.

Lava! Horrible Lava!

Naval Kumar teaches a cowering throng of movie savages that you don't mess with someone who counts a giant, eyepatch wearing genie among his friends.

Oh, by the way, for those of you that didn't know, this disc was released by SHEMAROO.

While I recommend Saat Sawal, I must warn consumers that the currently available Shemaroo VCD features ads that interrupt the movie midway through on each of the two discs, as well as a crawl announcing other Shemaroo releases that periodically appears at the bottom of the screen. For reals, Shemaroo? I mean, I understand the nature of capitalism and everything, and I'm more than happy to sit through some ads at the front end of the VCD in exchange for having access to a film like Saat Sawal in a convenient and affordable format, but what is there to gain in stomping all over my viewing experience like that? It's enough to make me want to sic my eyepatch-wearing, giant, people-eating genie on you.

Friday, November 28, 2008

Darna and the Tree Monster (aka Darna At Ang Babaing Tuod) is the fifth feature film based on Filipino comic book kingpin Mars Ravelo's Wonder Woman-inspired heroine Darna, and the only one of those films to star Eva Montes in the title role. The role would next go to Gina Pareno for another one-shot performance before being defined for the screen once-and-for-all by Filipino box office queen Vilma Santos in a run that would last through four films made between 1973 and 1979.

I must say that Montes got kind of a raw deal in terms of this being her one pass at playing Darna, because Darna and the Tree Monster, despite being adapted directly from a storyline in the original comic, is a Darna movie that has very little Darna in it. Instead, its running time is comprised largely of the type of overwrought, hand-wringing melodrama, fraught with intense religious overtones, that Filipino audiences apparently just can't get enough of, with a sudden abundance of superhero vs. monster action crammed into its final twenty minutes as if as an afterthought.

The story concerns a desperate woman who, unable to conceive, makes a pact with Satan in order that she may have a child. Old Scratch -- represented by a python who appears before the woman amid much thunder and lightning -- is happy to comply, but the daughter he blesses the woman with is soon revealed to be a bad seed. Indeed, in her teen years, Lucila (Gina Alonzo) proves to be the shame of her parents' existence, constantly listening to American rock and roll music, smoking, getting in catfights, and driving boys to temptation with her lascivious dancing. Finally, it seems that the unruly girl has begun to settle down, but on her wedding day her debt to the devil comes due, and she begins to periodically transform into a shambling tree monster -- which would make her a sort of were-tree, as it were.

After a brief and very welcome narrative digression in which we see Darna rescuing a woman from a man in a shabby gorilla suit, Darna's alter ego Narda (Coney Angeles), upon hearing a radio broadcast about Lucila's leafy depredations, transforms into our heroine and flies off to save the day, ultimately delivering comeuppance to the beast with a well placed head-butt. This was the last of the Darna films to feature a different, much younger actress in the role of Darna's alter ego, and future films would feature their lead actress playing both Narda and Darna, despite the comic's depiction of the adolescent Narda as simply being a vessel through which the adult Darna makes her appearance on Earth.

One aspect of Darna's alter ego that might strike Westerners as novel is that, unlike the urban professionals and reclusive millionaires who comprise the civilian guises of most American-style superheroes, Narda is a poor girl who, like many in the Philippines, lives in a small rural village. Just as with the humble origins provided most superhero types in Indian cinema, this allows an audience overwhelmingly made up of those from the less moneyed classes easier access to the fantasies of escape and transformation that such heroes provide. These early screen incarnations of Darna also gain a sort of everywoman appeal by virtue, at least in the case of Montes and Santos, of the less than Amazonian physical stature of the actresses who played her, and the fact that, despite the character's traditionally scanty attire, there doesn't seem to have been much of an attempt to sexualize her. More recent screen versions of Darna have favored lead actresses more on the bodacious side, but here the character seems to have a tomboyish kid sister quality that I imagine enabled her to appeal equally to audience members of both sexes.

The majority of cult cinema fans will probably find Darna and the Tree Monster most noteworthy for being an early directing effort by Cirio H. Santiago. Santiago's father, Ciriaco Santiago, was the founder of Premiere Productions, the company that produced the film, a fact which I'm sure had everything to do with Santiago junior being involved in it. Cirio's career would, of course, go on to include such landmarks of cinematic cooperation between the United States and the Philippines as T.N.T. Jackson, Vampire Hookers, Future Hunters and lots of movies with the word "Fist" in the title, and would see the director/producer working with Roger Corman on an impressive array of trash action pictures.

It's difficult for me to offer any type of real "critique" of Darna and the Tree Monster, mainly due to the dire condition of the version I watched -- typical of those few Filipino films of this vintage that are available for viewing at all -- and its lack of English subtitles. I will say, however, that the film, like quite a few homegrown Filipino movies before it, did manage to creep me out with its oppressively heavy Catholic imagery. Suffice it to say that this is a country where you don't mess with Jesus, and if you do, don't expect yourself to be considered worthy of anything less than the harshest of possible retributions. Still, the final moments of the film, which come complete with a barely mobile tree monster reminiscent at once of From Hell It Came and The Wizard of Oz and some wonderfully crude flying effects, packed in more psychotronic thrills than a lot of other films that seemed on the surface to be more promising. And, despite its preponderance of talk-heavy melodrama, there was enough of a weird aura about it to keep my attention fixed throughout.

Mostly I'm just glad whenever I have the opportunity to see a film like this, because there are so many others from its place and time that have since been lost. That I was also allowed by way of it to experience one of the most celebrated characters in its country's popular culture made that opportunity seem doubly rare.

Tuesday, November 25, 2008

One thing about Dara Singh: The man does not cotton to dinosaurs. He and dinosaurs are, in fact, natural enemies. I haven't finished watching King Kong yet, but I felt that I would be remiss in not sharing the following screencaps with you immediately. After all, it's important work we're doing here.

By the way, the King Kong in this picture is not the giant ape you might expect, but rather a bounteously man-boobed fellow wrestler of Dara's who looks an awful lot like Ken Davitian, the fellow who naked wrestled with Sacha Baron Cohen in Borat. This added an unpleasant dimension to those scenes in which Dara wrestled with King Kong, because I felt I had a pretty good idea of what nude King Kong would look like.

There was quite an interesting post on Kaiju Shakedown today regarding Nobuhiko Obayashi's twisted 1977 masterpiece Hausu, a film that I reviewed for Teleport City back in April. At the time I lamented the movie's unavailability on US DVD. Well, it turns out, according to KS's Grady Hendrix, that none other than Criterion bought the rights to Hausu some years ago, and the company has been sitting on a nice looking HD master of the film for quite some time with no immediate plans for a release. This, of course, is both good news and bad, because the thought of a Criterion quality release of this gem is enough to make me salivate out of my eyes. On the other hand, for there to be a release, Criterion has to, um, release it. Grady supplies an email link in his post so that you can email Criterion and politely let them know just how much you want them to release that movie where the lady gets eaten by a piano. Sounds like a good idea to me.

Monday, November 24, 2008

Shiva Ka Insaaf was India's second 3D movie, and its first in the Hindi language. This might seem irrelevant now, as the only way you can currently see the movie is in two dimensions on a chintzy Shemaroo DVD, but it's still good to know. Otherwise you'd be left perplexed by the number of times that people shove, thrust and hurl all variety of objects directly into the camera for no apparent reason throughout the course of the film.

Thursday, November 20, 2008

Yes, it's time for another trip down memory lane by way of lucha libre alley. If you like what you read here, many, many, MANY more reviews of Mexican Wrestling films can be found on my site The Lucha Diaries. (Seriously, there's a lot.)

******

Santo contra los Jinetes del Terror is a western about lepers. That fact alone is enough to draw me to it irresistibly. That it also contains Santo represents to me such an embarrassment of riches that I wouldn't be surprised if it also featured a female secret agent in a catsuit and a Taoist priest shooting cartoon rays out of his hands.

Now, exactly how Santo ended up in frontier times is not explained. There is, for instance, no reference to a time machine, or a prologue casting him as an ancestor of the modern day Santo. But I'm not going to speculate on the matter. I pledged at the outset that the words "canon" and "universe" would never appear alongside the name Santo in the Lucha Diaries -- just as I would never use the phrase "Wait for it!" -- and doing so would take me into dangerous territory. Instead, let's all just enjoy this horsey ride for what it is: an odd and reasonably entertaining oater in which Santo tracks a vicious gang who are using a group of escaped lepers to cover their crimes.

In terms of how the lepers are presented, the filmmakers really try to have it both ways. No opportunity is missed to exploit the scare value of their gruel-faced fuglitude (which is sometimes explored in such extreme close-up that I think I actually contracted leprosy through the TV screen). At the same time, great pains are taken to present them as sympathetic. So much so that Los Jinetes del Terror sometimes comes off like a leprosy themed After School Special. Santo cannot mention the lepers without pointing out how "unfortunate" or "miserable" they are, and there's even a scene in which Santo asks a doctor to explain the different types of leprosy, which the doctor proceeds to do in pretty great detail.

It's almost as if the movie was just one facet of a larger public awareness campaign regarding the disease. That's all well and good, but I must admit it's odd to see such sensitivity toward the afflicted in a genre that's so far proven to never be above the most callous exploitation of the vertically challenged. Then again, I may just have missed the movie where Santo runs around insisting that midgets be called "Little People" as he hurls them off scaffoldings and into sparking control panels. In any case, Santo's leper loving here seems to go so far as to blind him to the facts, as he promises the escapees that they will not be punished for the gangs' crimes, even though we've seen that the lepers actually agreed to take part in the scheme and even took part in a robbery in which a person was murdered. What a bleeding heart!

Another unusual aspect of Los Jinetes del Terror is how, due to Santo looking just extra weird wandering around in a late 19th century frontier town, the writers really had no choice but to have the other characters address the fact that his head is entirely covered by a silver wrestling mask. One of the bad guys even mocks Santo to his face by saying he looks like a pigeon. Then Santo kicks his ass. I myself would not tell Santo to his face that he looks like a pigeon. I'm no fighter, and while there may have been times when I have written things about Santo that weren't entirely respectful, if he were to appear before me right now I'd probably be all like, "Oh, uh, hey, Santo. I was just writing about how totally awesome you are. As usual! Heh heh..."

Anyway, Santo ultimately ingratiates himself with the townsfolk by defeating the bad guys and sparing the lepers from the wrath of an angry mob, then puts the icing on the delicious leprosy cake by delivering the good news of a cure. Unfortunately, he's a bit premature, because Dapsone, the first drug to effectively treat leprosy, wasn't introduced until the late forties (thanks Wikipedia!).

I know I usually limit myself to only pimping my own writings at Teleport City on this blog, but I just had to direct your attention to TC overlord Keith's brilliant dissection of the Dharmendra driven car wreck that is Saazish, a film that, in Keith's estimation, not even the presence of a cackling Fantomas clone can save. I wrote a brief post about the film back in August, but I just didn't have the spleen to give it the concentrated attention that an in-depth Teleport City review requires. In contrast, Keith got Saazish in a headlock, wrestled it to the floor, pried open its jaws, and, braving the smell of its ghastly fetid breath, stared deep into its gaping maw. Then, for good measure, he made it swallow a big doggie pill. (What? No, you're taking a metaphor too far!)

I'm happy to see that, with this review and my upcoming one of Shiva Ka Insaaf, Teleport City is once again temporarily transforming itself into Teleport Pradesh! The Bollywood movies we cover may never be screened on Turner Classics, but at least we're doing our part to make sure that no Indian film featuring a guy wearing a funny mask is able to slip quietly into obscurity.

Wednesday, November 19, 2008

It's been a while since I've posted any music recommendations here. That's because, first of all, well, who cares? -- but it's mainly because I just haven't come across anything new that I really, really love lately. During times like this it's my habit to fall back upon my reserves of 60s international pop and old Bollywood soundtracks to get me through. But clearly this tactic had run its course this time around, as the last couple of days have seen Gene Pitney's "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" playing on a constant loop in my head (which, for some reason, happens to me more than I'd like to admit).

Fortunately, A Hundred Things Keep Me Up at Night, the sophomore album from Gothenburg, Sweden's Love is All came along just in time, bearing enough aggressive infectiousness to eliminate any earworm that preceded it with extreme prejudice. The band combines an angsty, post-punk attack with a penchant for writing terse, manic pop songs with big shouty choruses. Singer Josephine Olausson is a high-strung, new wave yelper in the style of X-Ray Spex's Poly Styrene (a comparison that the band's incorporation of saxophone into their jagged, guitar-driven arrangements renders easy to make), but I can also think of other, less retro associations, as well. For instance, she also at times reminds me of The Knife's Karin Dreijer, though only if Dreijer, rather than being backed by icy electronics, was fronting a bunch of boys who sounded like they were trying to reduce their guitars to so many piles of bloody sawdust. A more obvious comparison would be Manda Rin of the late, lamented Bis -- which is probably not that surprising, given that Olausson and other key players in Love Is All have roots in 90s indie pop as former members of Girlfriendo.

Anyway, for a limited time, Other Music is offering a free download of the band's track "Wishing Well" to all and sundry. It's a great bit of fuzzed-out, frantic, race-to-the-finish-line bubblegum with a dourly amusing lyrical hook: "I threw my money in the wishing well/But nothing got better, only slightly wet." Ha!

If you'd like to sample the song in full, here's an impromptu video that the band shot for it while lounging around on some beach in Italy -- a circumstance that would make me hate them if their album wasn't so damn good.

In other music-related musings, I was saddened to learn last month of the breakup of The Long Blondes following their guitarist, Dorian Cox, suffering a debilitating stroke last August. They were a truly great band who, with two excellent albums under their belts, were just beginning to show the world what they could do. If you haven't checked them out yet, you owe it to yourself.

Saturday, November 15, 2008

Every once in a while I have an experience that leads me to think that it might be time to make some radical changes in my cinematic diet. For instance, last night I had this dream in which Dara Singh and Feroz Khan we're battling a giant rubber dinosaur that looked like it could have crawled out of an episode of the Japanese tokusatsu series Spectremanwhile starring in what was by all appearances an Italian Peplum.

Holy crap! That was no dream... That was Samson! Behold!

Raaaaar!

Feroz seems like he's trying to pass for ShammiKapoor in this movie, but that does not spare him the mighty lizard's wrath.

It's impossible to over-stress the importance of teaching your dinosaur who the pack leader is.

Now, I'm far from a Biblical scholar, but it appears to me that Dara's lustrous locks are this movie's only concession to the original source material.

Arghhh! I'm dead.

But that's not all. Feast your eyes upon these other wonders that await you in Samson.

THRILL... to the midget with breath of fire!

CHILL... as terror strikes Legoland!

FEEL... vaguely uncomfortable at the sight of the barely pubescent but unarguably beautiful Mumtaz.

ILL... as more Dara Singh buffalo shots than you thought you'd ever see in your entire lifetime play before you're eyes within a scant 120 minutes.

Plus... the evil king receives sage advice from the world's tiniest life coach.

Tuesday, November 11, 2008

The theme of this month's review roundtable over at the B-Masters Cabal is the alternative living dead (aka "The Other Dead Meat"), a no-zombies-allowed appreciation of all of those other less comforting conceptions of the afterlife that can be found throughout the darker reaches of world cinema. My humble contribution is a review over at Teleport City of the Mexican wrestlers vs. monsters epic The Mummies of Guanajuato, a film that, for the first time, teamed the three biggest stars in lucha libre -- Santo, Blue Demon and Mil Mascaras, pitting them against a disorderly gang of unaccountably muscular mummified remains.

Monday, November 10, 2008

Hawa Mahal is a low budget fantasy film starring Helen that is equal parts Arabian Nights and Flash Gordon, so brimming with shoe-string visual wonders -- all struggling to reach your eyes through the film's timeworn curtain of decay like a parade of dimly perceived hallucinations -- that it becomes mesmerizing even without the aid of subtitle-enabled comprehension. In all, it's an artifact of a side of Bollywood that until only recently had been unknown to me, one in which can be seen undersea kingdoms, spectral swordsmen, flying horses, and, most impressively in this case, a giant suitmation monster that looks like it could have jumped right out of an episode of Ultraman.

Interestingly, just as in America during those decades previous to the advent of the big budget special effects extravaganza, it was India's B movie industry that took up the challenge of visualizing the fantastic, even though they were the most ill-equipped to do so. Indeed, many of Hawa Mahal's effects are so technically crude that I felt like I could have been watching one of Georges Melies' efforts from the turn of the century. This, of course, only adds to the movie's charm, and doesn't detract in the least from my delight in finding that there was, despite its near invisibility in the mainstream, a home for monsters, magic and feats of scientific wonder in Indian cinema during this period.

Due to the lack of subtitles, I can only be very general in terms of synopsis, but suffice it to say that Helen plays Champakali, some type of sea-dwelling enchantress -- a siren? a water sprite? -- charged with the task of luring seamen to their watery doom. When she ends up sparing Kumar (Ranjan), a sailor whom she has taken a particular shine to, her sister, Neelampari (Bela Bose), is outraged, and banishes her to the surface world. No sooner has Champakali seen land, however, than the evil Jadugar Vaital comes soaring by in his flying palace with his evil wizard sidekick in tow and, catching sight of her, decides to steal her for his own. This leaves the brave Kumar, who has taken an equal shine to Champakali, with the task of rescuing her -- a treacherous one, considering that he is a mere mortal and Jadugar Vaital has all kinds of powerful black magic at his disposal. To this end, he enlists the aid of a shaman's two bumbling disciples, who provide him with an assortment of magical objects, including a magic flower that shoots squiggly cartoon rays and enables teleportation and a small statue that enables the person holding it to fly and can also cause massive amounts of hair clippings to fall from the sky. (Believe me, you just have to see it.)

Much like Kumar in his quest to rescue Champakali, the viewer of Hawa Mahal must overcome an array of seemingly insurmountable obstacles in his or her quest to enjoy those treasures that it holds, not the least of which is the fact that the evil wizards at T-Series have decided to render the VCD of it in fake wide-screen, effectively saying "off with their heads" with regards to most of the cast for much of the movie's running time. Aside from that, irksome is the amount of screen time dedicated to the two comic relief holy men, and disappointing -- given the presence of two such stellar item girls as Helen and Bela Bose -- is the fact that the film features essentially no musical numbers (though two songs composed by Avinash Vyas can be heard at its beginning and end).

Despite these shortcomings, however, Hawa Mahal, in its modest way, managed to cast a kind of low-key, non-binding spell upon me, resulting in a contented, if not ecstatic, smile remaining on my face throughout its minus-two-hour stay in my DVD player. On the other hand, my warm feelings might have been as much the result of what Hawa Mahal promised as of what it actually delivered, because, thanks to the many strange wonders it showed me, I am now anticipating those further wonders that the world of Indian poverty row cinema has in store.

The subject of today's review is Warrant. Not Warrant as in the band that sang "Cherry Pie", but Warrant as in, "Warrant you that creepy old guy who was repeatedly cast opposite starlets who were a generation younger than him throughout the Seventies?" That's right, Warrant is yet another starring vehicle for that boon to stunt doubles and toupee makers that was late period Dev Anand. And while I've already voiced my objections to this unctuous and unaccountably smug creature, my experience with the rollicking adventure yarn Kalabaaz taught me that not every movie that contains him necessarily has to suck. This emboldened me to give Warrant a try.

After all, I thought, how could a movie that stars Zeenat Aman as a ruthless assassin for hire, and also features the great Dara Singh in a prominent supporting role, be bad? I then braced myself for the worst, since that question usually serves to bring perilously large chunks of suckitude hailing down upon my head like some kind of malevolently rebounding magical incantation. This time, however, I was right, for Warrant turned out to be a prime example of fast-paced and colorful Seventies Indian action cinema at its flashiest, trashiest and, most importantly, mustache-iest.

Dev plays a jailer whose life is saved during a prison riot by Dinesh (Satish Kaul), an inmate who has been sentenced to death for a murder he says he did not commit. Dev becomes convinced of Dinesh's innocence and, when he cannot postpone his execution by legal means, breaks him out of prison, becoming a fugitive himself in the process. Unfortunately for Dev, his by-the-book police chief father (played by the mighty Pran, who was only three years senior to Dev) is not about to let family feeling stand in the way of his harsh conception of justice, and so issues a warrant ordering that Dev be captured dead or alive.

Meanwhile a white-suited Mr. Big called the Master (Ajit), the mastermind behind the murder Dinesh has been charged with, puts a hit out on Dev and Dinesh in order to prevent them from discovering the truth. To this end, he hires Rita, a stylish assassin played by Zeenat Aman who is so ruthlessly efficient that she only loads her pistol with one bullet for each intended victim. Rita, of course, turns out to be more than she seems, and eventually and depressingly ends up succumbing to Dev's wholly fictional charms. No matter though, because the Master also has at his disposal a small army of Smurf-like, blue-suited goons, as well as a roller-skating femme fatale named Saloni (Barbara Shankar) and an assortment of numerically designated lackeys to carry out his dirty work. The result is that Dev and Dinesh must conduct their Search For The Real Killer while being hunted from all sides, a state of affairs which forces them to resort to the use of a number of putatively clever disguises (involving mustaches) and ultimately to seek the assistance of a hulking, cab driving ex-con named Pyara Singh (played by -- guess who -- Dara Singh).

I kind of wish I'd seen Warrant before submitting my response to Beth's recent lair-themed poll over at Beth Loves Bollywood, because the Master's hideout is definitely one for the pages of Better Lairs and Dungeons, holding in store for Dev such diabolical tortures as the acid pit high-dive and the terrible room of clocks! And while it's suitably lavish on its own merits, the makers of Warrant greedily and shamelessly strive to make it even more so with the insertion of stolen footage of the volcano-based bad guy compound from the James Bond movie You Only Live Twice, a spectacular construction that no doubt cost in excess of ten times Warrant's entire budget. It's hard to imagine that anyone was ever fooled by this, because the difference in film stock quality between the borrowed and original footage is pretty obvious, but that doesn't stop them from also using a generous amount of action footage from You Only Live Twice for the movie's climax. The result is sort of like if Pran made a YouTube video in which he took a famous scene from a Bond film and clumsily replaced all of the shots of Sean Connery with ones of himself acting against a poorly matched backdrop. Under those circumstances -- and if Pran was ten -- you might be pretty impressed, but, as is, it's kind of sad, but also awesome.

So, yes, Warrant is a movie that desperately wants to be a James Bond film -- perhaps, astoundingly, even more so than most other Bollywood action movies of its era -- and that desire burns so brightly that it blinds its proponents to even the most basic logic-based restrictions as they scramble toward their goal. Why, for instance, does Dev's character, being only a humble Jailer, come equipped with a watch that's tricked out with fancy secret gimmicks? And why does R.D. Burman compromise what is otherwise a typically original and accomplished bit of soundtrack work by incorporating immediately identifiable elements of the 007 theme into his instrumental score? Because, well, that's the type of movie this is, that's why. What really matters on our end is that Warrant is dizzying fun, barreling along at a breathless pace with a gleeful disregard for plausibility and a furious desire to entertain. To this end, it uses all of the iconic stars in its supporting cast to best advantage, meaning that fans of Zeenat, Pran and Dara Singh will all come away from it with toasty feelings. And if you're a fan of Dev Anand's movies from the Seventies, well, you'll obviously watch anything, so dig in.